From PHPBuilder.com today, there's a new tutorial that looks at one of the more handy features built into PHP, one that makes personalized sites a whole lot easier - sessions - and their management.

In a nutshell, sessions are the way that we "maintain state" from one page to the next, that is, how we identify specific users across multiple page requests.

When the user comes to the site, we need to be able to give them a unique identifier (a session id) that will allow us to know the difference between each user on the site. So, when the user logs in, and then modifies their choices for foo.php, we know whose profile to save those changes to.

The article goes on to talk about what sessions really are, how they're handled on both the client and server side, and a simple code example of how to check the value of them. Thankfully, they also include a section on session vulnerabilities, showing how with something as simple as some Javascript, a session can be maipulated.

To help prevent this, they give some examples of securing your sessions. Then, to illustrate all of the above points, they provide some simple code validate the session information that's been set.

Update 2006-08-17:

I forgot that Wolfgang and me moved the dates for the sessions, because Wolfgang is on vacation and wants to take part in the sessions. Sorry for that! So, here are the correct dates:

After the highly successful first online session about eZ components, which I made in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de, we decided to set up another one. Even better: This time we will have 2 sessions and both for free. As last time, the first session "eZ components I" will give a general introduction to our enterprise PHP library and will guide you to the usage of eZ components. You will learn all necessary basics to get started with eZ components supported development and get to know some interessting components, based on a simple example application. The seconde (new) session "eZ components II" will get into more detail on 2 important components, which are not covered in the first session: eZ Template and eZ Mail. I consider those as 2 of our most important and impressive components, so this looks very promissing. Beside that, the 2nd session will cover more components, that are not shown in the first part.

Since dynamic-webpages.de is a German website, the sessions will again be in German language. If you are interessted, you can simply register for taking part on dynamic-webpages.de and join us. It would be quite cool, to offer those sessions to an international audience, too. So, if you provide online seminars in a similar way, feel free to contact me about this!

Thanks a lot to dynamic-webpages.de for sponsoring the equipment and bandwidth again and to eZ systems for sponsoring my efforts!

DevShed is continuing its series on using Visitor objects in PHP5 with this new tutorial today, a look at uisng them in relation to MySQL and sets of data inside.

So far, implementing visitor objects with PHP is indeed a educational process, which helps to extend even more the boundaries of the vast arena of pattern-based programming. Based on this premise, in the course of this last article, I'll expand the application of the visitor pattern by developing a slightly more realistic example. It will show you how to use visitors objects to establish a direct relationship between a MySQL processing class and a pagination mechanism.

They start by establishing an interaction between the visitors and the data in the MySQL database, providing the complete code for the class and the creation of the visitor objects. The wrap it up with a look at the creation of a pagination class, linking the display of a "page" of records to each of the visitors of the site.

To help even more people get aquaintd with the Zend Framework, Rob Allen has created an impressive guide to getting started with the framework.

The Zend Framework is now at version 0.1.5, so it's time for me to have a go at writing a getting started guide! This tutorial is intended to give a very basic introduction to using the Zend Framework to write a very basic database driven application.

The guide [pdf] briefly covers what the MVC architecture is before moving into the hows, whys, and whats of the Framework itself. He explains:

• the directory structure,
• bootstrapping,
• setting up your first model/view/controller set,
• styling the site,
• using a database,
• working with POST and GET vars

On the Killersoft blog today, Clay Loveless has posted his decision about his development environment - choosing Komodo Pro over the Zend Studio.

A long time BBEdit user, I bit the bullet and (mostly) switched to Zend Studio back in November 2005. I was frustrated by Zend Studio's clunky Subversion handling, but within a few weeks was willing to put up with that for Zend Studio's great debugging environment and intimate knowledge of PHP that helps speed coding along on a line-by-line basis.

The switch to an Intel Mac broke Zend Studio's great debugger. Whoops! There went at least half of why I was using Zend Studio in the first place. Enter Komodo Pro. Komodo Pro 3 has supported Intel Macs for months. (Still no word from Zend on this issue.) Its debugging environment is based on the robust Xdebug extension.

He mentions that this is what he's working up his current project in, Mashery, with his own compiled version of XDebug integrated.

Komodo Pro lets me work the way I want to, with the tools (and versions of those tools) I want to use. Zend Studio, on the other hand, does not.

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted today about the posting of the latest release candidate for his FUDForum software, version 2.7.6RC1.

A new version of FUDforum is on the release path. This release is largely a feature addition release with a fair quantity of new functionality being added. That said there were a few bug fixes sprinkled in between as well.

The upgrade and installer can be downloaded from here:
Installer Download
Upgrade Script

The main updates to this new release include the admin ability ti edit topic ratings and to display flags beside users based on geo-location information.

Some concepts of object-oriented design are harder to figure out that others for a budding programmer. Thankfully, there's articles like this one from DevShed to help fill in some of the gaps. Specifically, they focus on inheritance, polymorphism, and serialization in your PHP classes.

If you are working with classes in PHP, you will sooner or later encounter inheritance, polymorphism, and serialization. The ability to use these three will help speed up your code writing. This article covers how to use them, and more.

First off, they look at inheritance and working with child classes before moving on to polymorphism (similar functionality, different objects), calling functions statically, and serializing objects to make passing them around much easier.

In his latest post on the SitePoint blog today, Harry Fuecks explains and demonstrates how to send UTF-8 encoded emails with the help of the eZ components library of tools.

One of the subjects I brushed over last week was how you handle UTF-8 in email, because I don't have a full picture on the best way to solve this. The fundamental problem is summarized nicely on Wikipedia's discussion of MIME.

Part of the problem there is there are different approaches to how you can solve this. There's plenty of gotchas and clearly more than than you get by default with PHP's mail function (that's after you fixed your code for email injection). In other words taking a "not invented here" view is going to leave you with a big workload.

So, Harry suggests uisng the Mail classes from the eZ components libraries to send (explicitly) UTF-8 encoded emails. He also includes a simple example of how to send it, showing a message in German to be sent correctly.

Tobias Schlitt opens an invitation to all developers out there seeking to find out more about the eZ components system by offering two free sessions to bring you up to speed.

After the highly successful first online session about eZ components, which I made in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de, we decided to set up another one. Even better: This time we will have 2 sessions and both for free. As last time, the first session "eZ components I" will give a general introduction to our enterprise PHP library and will guide you to the usage of eZ components.

The seconde (new) session "eZ components II" will get into more detail on 2 important components, which are not covered in the first session: eZ Template and eZ Mail.

These sessions will be offered on September 4th (Part 1) and September 6th (Part 2) and to register, simply head to their site and submit your information today. Note: all tutorials will be in German.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a guide seeking to help you optimize your PHP through a number of simple steps - six of them to be exact:

• object code caching
• Template systems
• Distributed object caching systems
• PHP variables that can be set
• Output Compression
• Other things that may help

Under each item there is more information, links, and even examples of the config files to help you along your way.